We are pleased to announce our investment in Landing’s recent Series B financing. We led the round, with prior investors Greycroft and Maveron also participating. Landing is transforming apartment living from one of the most complex and inefficient experiences in modern housing into a seamless delight. Founded by serial entrepreneur Bill Smith, the company provides its members access to a nationwide network of furnished apartments with flexible lease terms currently available in 75 U.S. cities.
You can think of Landing as “Living-as-a-Service.” They connect the dots in a fragmented housing market, creating value for landlords, property managers, leasing agents, brokers, and renters. Landing’s service increases cash flow for landlords, drives down vacancy percentages for property managers, and increases commissions for leasing agents and brokers. For renters, Landing’s flexible membership model delivers a value-added experience that includes 24/7 concierge services and managed home sharing, all while massively decreasing the upfront costs associated with traditional long-term lease agreements.
We first met Bill in 2018 when Moody participated in Steve Case’s Rise of the Rest Tour in Birmingham, AL. At that time, Bill was the CEO of Shipt which he had recently sold to Target for $550m. Moody eventually worked with Bill on Birmingham Bound and served with him on Governor Ivey’s Alabama Innovation Commission. Bill’s skills as a leader and his #GiveFirst approach to supporting Birmingham’s startup community have been awesome to witness.
Bill has scaled and successfully exited businesses since he founded Insight Card Services in 2009. He has a keen eye for recognizing when industries are on the cusp of innovation, and the situation is no different with Landing. He has pulled together a solid leadership team that includes alums from Shipt along with OYO and WeWork. Their collective expertise positions them well to deliver a delightful experience to their customers.
Landing is in our Marketplace theme, with companies like Rover, SeatGeek, Xometry, The Pro’s Closet, and Havenly. Welcome Bill and the Landing team. We couldn’t be more excited to be on this journey with you!
Crucible Acquisition Corporation Announces Pricing of Upsized $225 Million Initial Public Offering
January 05, 2021 10:27 AM Eastern Standard Time
BOULDER, Colo.–(BUSINESS WIRE)–Crucible Acquisition Corporation (the “Company”) announced today that it priced its initial public offering of 22,500,000 units at $10.00 per unit. The units will be listed on the New York Stock Exchange (the “NYSE”) and trade under the ticker symbol “CRU.U” beginning January 5, 2021. Each unit consists of one share of Class A common stock and one-third of one redeemable warrant. Each whole warrant entitles the holder thereof to purchase one share of Class A common stock at a price of $11.50 per share. Only whole warrants are exercisable. Once the securities comprising the units begin separate trading, the shares of Class A common stock and redeemable warrants are expected to be listed on the NYSE under the symbols “CRU” and “CRU WS,” respectively.
The Company, led by James M. Lejeal, Brad Feld and Jason M. Lynch, is a blank check company formed for the purpose of effecting a merger, capital stock exchange, asset acquisition, stock purchase, reorganization or similar business combination with one or more businesses. The Company intends to focus its search on target businesses in the software technology industry, prioritizing cloud-based recurring revenue business models.
Credit Suisse is acting as sole book-running manager for the offering. The Company has granted the underwriter a 45-day option to purchase up to an additional 3,375,000 units at the initial public offering price to cover over-allotments, if any.
The offering is being made only by means of a prospectus. When available, copies of the prospectus may be obtained from Credit Suisse Securities (USA) LLC, Attn: Prospectus Department, 6933 Louis Stephens Drive, Morrisville, NC 27560, Telephone: 1-800-221-1037, Email: [email protected].
Registration statements relating to the securities became effective on January 4, 2021. This press release shall not constitute an offer to sell or the solicitation of an offer to buy, nor shall there be any sale of these securities in any state or jurisdiction in which such offer, solicitation or sale would be unlawful prior to registration or qualification under the securities laws of any such state or jurisdiction.
The offering is expected to close on January 7, 2021, subject to customary closing conditions.
Forward-Looking Statements
This press release contains statements that constitute “forward-looking statements,” including with respect to the proposed initial public offering and search for and/or completion of an initial business combination. No assurance can be given that the offering will be completed on the terms described, or at all, or that the Company will complete an initial business combination. Forward-looking statements are subject to numerous conditions, many of which are beyond the control of the Company, including those set forth in the Risk Factors section of the Company’s registration statements and preliminary prospectus for the Company’s offering filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (the “SEC”). Copies of these documents are available on the SEC’s website, www.sec.gov. The Company undertakes no obligation to update these statements for revisions or changes after the date of this release, except as required by law.
We are pleased to announce our recent investment in Parallel Domain alongside our friends and partners at Calibrate Ventures and Costanoa Ventures. We are excited to invest in another breakout company from our Partner Fund portfolio.
From self-driving cars to delivery drones, autonomous systems have the opportunity to significantly improve the quality of life for billions of people. Training and testing these machines to perceive the surrounding world, however, is neither scalable nor reliable. The current approach suffers a critical bottleneck: collecting, labeling, and curating data.
Autonomous vehicle companies alone spend billions of dollars per year collecting and labeling data. Companies enlist millions of outsourced human labelers to draw and trace the annotations that the algorithms need to learn. Curating these datasets to include the right distribution and frequency of samples becomes exponentially more difficult as performance requirements increase.
Nearly every application that utilizes computer vision faces this challenging pattern when it comes to data. By turning this real-world problem into a software solution, synthetic data provides a step-change in accuracy, flexibility, and safety.
The Parallel Domain platform, composed of a suite of APIs and developer tools, enables customers to generate synthetic sensor data on-demand, providing essential performance improvements while reducing developer iteration time. Used by some of the world’s top AI companies, auto manufacturers, and delivery companies, Parallel Domain provides value through the full computer vision development cycle, from initial prototyping and model training to testing and post-deployment maintenance. Data that was once time-consuming, expensive, and dangerous to collect and label is now at a developer’s fingertips.
The team, headed by CEO Kevin McNamara, is a deeply experienced group of synthetic data and machine learning specialists from Apple, Pixar, Toyota, Electronic Arts, and more.
Parallel Domain is our second foray into the challenging field of training and testing for autonomous systems. We are happy to apply the lessons and learnings from our prior investment to help the company and their team optimize the platform for customers. Parallel Domain falls into our Glue theme, along with portfolio cousins Mapbox and Fritz.AI.
A big “Thank You” to John Cowgill and the Costanoa team for introducing us to Parallel Domain after leading the seed financing. We’re thrilled to officially welcome Kevin and the Parallel Domain team to the Foundry Family!
Foundry Network Holiday Gift Guide 2020 Edition
Are you looking for unique and cool holiday gifts? Maybe stay-at-home orders have you looking to treat yourself to something new and fun?
Our 2020 Holiday Gift Guide highlights Foundry’s direct investments, as well as our partner funds’ portfolio companies, and it has something for everyone on your list. We categorized all of our offerings to help you zero in on what you need easily.
Happy Holidays from your friends at Foundry Group!
Our Investment in ColdQuanta
We are excited to announce our Series A investment in ColdQuanta, alongside Maverick Ventures, Global Frontier Investments, and LCP Quantum Partners. ColdQuanta, based in our own backyard here in Boulder, Colorado, is the market leader in commercializing quantum atomics. Their Quantum Core™ technology is based on ultra-cold atoms: lasers cool atoms to nearly absolute zero, and manipulate and control them with a high level of precision. This core technology has broad applications in quantum computing and beyond.
ColdQuanta manufactures components, instruments, and turnkey systems that address a broad spectrum of applications: quantum computing, quantum timekeeping, quantum signal processing, and quantum communications.
The company’s origins come from decades of research in ultra-cold atomic physics by founder and CTO Dana Anderson, and his work at JILA, formerly known as the Joint Institute for Laboratory Astrophysics. He is joined by CEO and President, Bo Ewald, and Paul Schroeter, COO, who leads ColdQuanta’s R&D, operations, and engineering teams.
ColdQuanta is one of the few companies in the world who can claim to have their hardware survive the rigors of launch and be operational aboard the International Space Station, and has recently announced the availability of Albert, a system enabling researchers to create, manipulate, and measure quantum matter via the cloud.
ColdQuanta’s years of experience developing and deploying real-world cold-atom quantum devices, Bo’s deep background in supercomputing and quantum computing, and Dana’s world-class scientific achievements led us to want to be part of the ColdQuanta mission to power the coming quantum information age.
